At the Gallery

L admiring Nightscape by Louis Nevelson in the Modern 2 gallery. Partly inspired by seeing it in the monthly art quiz (a shame it stopped being weekly!) we had also arranged to meet a friend for lunch as he was going to be in Edinburgh.
As with any artist, there is a story to tell. According to Wikipedia, Nevelson was an important figure in the feminist art movement. She challenged the vision of what type of art women would be creating with her dark, monumental artworks, the sorts of things had been seen as masculine. Nevelson believed that art reflected the individual, not "masculine-feminine labels", and chose to take on her role as an artist, not a female artist. Reviews of Nevelson's works in the 1940s wrote her off as just a woman artist. One reviewer of her 1941 exhibition at Nierendorf Gallery stated: "We learned the artist is a woman in time to check our enthusiasm. Had it been otherwise, we might have hailed these sculptural expressions as by surely a great figure among moderns." Another review showed similar sexism: "Nevelson is a sculptor; she comes from Portland, Maine. You'll deny both these facts and you might even insist Nevelson is a man, when you see her Portraits in Paint, showing this month at the Nierendorf Gallery." Amazing to think these were serious reviews of her work.